sanitizing disc

[Nathan Dorfman]

On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 5:42 PM, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> These commands apply only to quite modern drives. Also, use of these
> commands is for advanced users only. A mistake can brick the drive,
> making it completely unusable, with no option but to discard the drive.
> Worse - the drive may be bricked without first destroying the data.
> Direct use of drive-level commands is a good, fast solution for the
> professional or commercial operator, but is not a wise choice for the
> amateur or home user that needs to wipe the occasional disk..

Well, you have a point that it's a sharp tool, but so is pointing
shred at device files. The ATA command is actually superior, in that
it will also clean blocks marked as "bad" by the drive firmware, which
are no longer visible to Linux and are thus immune to shred or any
other software. So, I would still recommend it first, even if shred is
almost as good.

Maybe it's possible to brick the drive this way, but I don't think
it's very easy to do so. Regardless, the same functionality is
available in GUI form; the gnome-disks utility presents an option to
use ATA Erase when 'Format' is invoked on a disk. So, there's nothing
scary about it.

-nd.